In just 7 days, football fortunes flip for UNC and NC State. Up is down. Right is left.

A week ago, N.C. State was wondering where its season was headed after a disappointing road loss, and North Carolina was right back on track after a resounding home win over a division rival.

Football can be fickle, especially in the ACC, but the past seven days have induced the kind of whiplash that can buy a chiropractor a boat.

Now N.C. State is eyeing an Atlantic Division title and North Carolina is in season-saving mode against Duke in a game that didn’t look particularly pivotal before the season started, but is now for both teams.

As quickly as things turned, they turned just as dramatically with N.C. State’s streak-snapping double-overtime win over Clemson and North Carolina’s reprise of last season’s Florida State disaster, this time at Georgia Tech.

The team expected to contend for a division title is facing virtual elimination from that race Saturday against an archrival that, an early stumble at Charlotte notwithstanding, has yet to lose an ACC game. (Or play one, but still.)

And the team given an outside shot at a division title at best now has the best shot of anyone, although the Wolfpack still has to travel to two places where it has tripped over its own shoelaces before, at Boston College in October and at Wake Forest in November.

But Clemson was the big one, the highest hurdle, and N.C. State has cleared that. There’s a world of opportunity laid out before the Wolfpack that just hasn’t been there before, like the moment when the Wizard of Oz flips from black and white to color. None of that is given, and all of it can be lost — just ask North Carolina! — but it’s out there, waiting, looming.

There’s much less on the Tar Heels’ agenda now, certainly compared to August, but even compared to the aftermath of the jarring Virginia Tech loss. Starting with a division loss was less than ideal but far from catastrophic, and the Tar Heels certainly looked like they had recovered at least some of their swagger in the shootout win over Virginia. Then it all came crashing down with a performance at Georgia Tech that was not merely baffling nor embarrassing nor humiliating, but all of the above.

The postmortem on this North Carolina season has already started and will go on for years, with a seemingly inexhaustible list of points open to debate, from the offensive line to the coaching staff and everything between. Mack Brown’s magical mystery tour back through campus has come to an abrupt halt, with the bandwagon propped up on concrete blocks in the yard.

And the season isn’t even a month old.

In the space of two games, both North Carolina and N.C. State went through a simultaneous double reversal of fortunes, one all the way up and the other all the way down, and then back again. What they share, other than perhaps emotional fatigue, is a joint recalibration of expectations.

The Wolfpack’s have been dialed up, and haven’t been higher in more than a decade. The hardest task on the schedule has been successfully completed, and N.C. State is in total control of its own destiny. It’s a new day, at least for the moment.

The Tar Heels’ have been squashed under the heel of a boot; even if North Carolina wasn’t the team just about everyone thought it was in August, as is obviously now the case, it certainly was thought to be a good enough team to dominate Georgia Tech and was barely competitive instead.

The question facing the Tar Heels now isn’t what is their ceiling, as it has been since the end of last season. It’s now: What is their floor?